Introduction

Joomla!1.6 manages languages for components in four different situations:

displaying a component in the public site

managing a component in the backend

managing menus in the backend

installing a component (new in 1.6)

Joomla!1.6 uses two different location folder for languages:

one in administrator/language or language

one in the component folder (administrator/component/*component*/language or component/*component*/language)

It depends how the component is installed.

Adding language translation in the public site

With your favorite file manager and editor, put a file site/language/en-GB/en-GB.com_helloworld.ini. This file will contain translation for the public part.

site/language/en-GB/en-GB.com_helloworld.ini

; Joomla16.Tutorials; Copyright (C) 2005 - 2009 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved.; License GNU General Public License version 2 or later; see LICENSE.txt, see LICENSE.php; Note : All ini files need to be saved as UTF-8 - No BOM

For the moment, there are no translations strings in this file.

Adding language translation when managing the component

With your favorite file manager and editor, put a file admin/language/en-GB/en-GB.com_helloworld.ini. This file will contain translation for the backend part.

admin/language/en-GB/en-GB.com_helloworld.ini

; Joomla16.Tutorials; Copyright (C) 2005 - 2009 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved.; License GNU General Public License version 2 or later; see LICENSE.txt, see LICENSE.php; Note : All ini files need to be saved as UTF-8 - No BOMCOM_HELLOWORLD_HELLOWORLD_VIEW_DEFAULT_MSG_LABEL="Message"COM_HELLOWORLD_HELLOWORLD_VIEW_DEFAULT_MSG_DESC="This message will be displayed"COM_HELLOWORLD_HELLOWORLD_ID="Id"COM_HELLOWORLD_HELLOWORLD_GREETING="Greeting"

Adding language translation when managing the menus in the backend

With your favorite file manager and editor, put a file admin/language/en-GB/en-GB.com_helloworld.menu.ini. This file will contain translation for the backend part.

admin/language/en-GB/en-GB.com_helloworld.menu.ini

; Joomla16.Tutorials; Copyright (C) 2005 - 2009 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved.; License GNU General Public License version 2 or later; see LICENSE.txt, see LICENSE.php; Note : All ini files need to be saved as UTF-8 - No BOMCOM_HELLOWORLD_HELLOWORLD_VIEW_DEFAULT_TITLE="Hello World"COM_HELLOWORLD_HELLOWORLD_VIEW_DEFAULT_DESC="This view displays a selected message"

Adding translation when installing the component

With your favorite file manager and editor, put a file language/en-GB/en-GB.ini. This file will contain translation for the install.

language/en-GB/en-GB.ini

; Joomla16.Tutorials; Copyright (C) 2005 - 2009 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved.; License GNU General Public License version 2 or later; see LICENSE.txt, see LICENSE.php; Note : All ini files need to be saved as UTF-8 - No BOMCOM_HELLOWORLD_DESCRIPTION="This is the Hello World description"

Create a compressed file of this directory or directly download the archive and install it using the extension manager of Joomla!1.6. You can add a menu item of this component using the menu manager in the backend.